Book Review: The Urban Bestiary

The Urban Bestiaryby Lyanda Lynne HauptLittle, Brown, 2013 The boutique dilemma in the background of Lyanda Lynne Haupt's new book The Urban Bestiary - the 21st century resurgence of wildlife into the occupied precincts of humans in North America and Western Europe - would, just sitting there unaddressed for more than 200 pages, commence to annoy the bejeezus out of any half-way conscientious reader if what was going on in the forefront of the book weren't so well done.That forefront is a series of chapter-length essays on the various animal opportunists taking advantage of hunting bans and increased ecological sensitivity among city-dwellers in order to sneak down alleys at night, set up pet-watching stations in unfenced backyards, carry off treasure from the mountains of food wasted by coffee shops and donut shops and the like every day, etc. In an exercise familiar to this kind of book - but enlivened throughout here by lively prose - Haupt gives her readers getting-to-know-you chapters on some of the animals most likely to be encountered by her hipster readers as they sit on their back porches smoking; there are informative and sympathetic portraits of raccoons, opossums, coyotes, moles, squirrels, and even the lowly rat, in whose twitchy countenance Haupt would like us to see hidden depths:

Though we may partake of the common rat revulsion, most of us probably also know that rates are fascinating, intelligent, and make wonderful pets: they learn their names, come when called, bon readily with individual humans, play games like a dog, and snuggled to sleep on laps or in pockets. But rats may possess further depths that w are just beginning to understand. While laughter was long believed by ethologists to be a behavior limited to humans and, perhaps, the higher primates, recent studies show that young rats appear to laugh when they are tickled. They don't emit the high laughter sounds when their backs are tickled, just when their tummies are - like human children.

She spares very little time for wolves, but she turns in an almost lyrical chapter on bears (black bears only - a book like Urban Bestiary mostly likely wouldn't go over all that well in the growing number of Canadian and Alaskan small towns dealing with an influx of polar bears) and cougars:

Much of our human wandering in bear-and-cougar land is psychic. Remembering these wildest beings, knowing they are present and real in the wilderness beyond the sight lines of our daily lives, we gather vitality, and sustenance, and a sense of our own inner wildness. We dream of these places, the bear-and-cougar places, and when we can, we load our packs and wander their paths for a day or a week, walking with care and practical caution, with awe and love.

And she makes sure to spend an almost equal amount of time with birds as well, giving us surprisingly affectionate overviews of such city-living birds as hawks, owls, crows, house sparrows, and even the raw-voiced starling, for which Haupt has only the warmest recollections:

I have raised several starlings, including one right out of the egg. I named her Delphinium, and though she was eaten by a cat before I could teach her to sing a Mozart concerto, as I'd hoped to do, I lived with her long enough to learn that starlings are delightful, playful, interactive pets and will follow you around the house as loyally as any puppy. I remember attempting to create a rare moment of starling-free solitude by locking Delphinium out when I used the bathroom, but she called piteously from the other side of the door, then rejoiced when I finally opened it, jumping up and down on her stout pink legs.

She closes out her book with an equally-loving portrait of the animal that made it necessary in the first place: humans. It can be safely assumed that most of the humans who'll be buying Haupt's book will want to see themselves included, and they won't have much interest in buying a book that portrays them as the bad guy in this particular melodrama. Better by far the virtuous underdog:

Physically, we are virtually defenseless - more so for our size than any other mammal, including a mouse. The skin on our hands and feet is a little callused, but not very. We are not hoofed or protectively padded. We have no sharp teeth, no claws, no armor, no plates, no scales. We have no venom, no bitter taste or mild toxicity in our skin, no chemical defenses. All that we have done to create beauty; to raise culture; to dominate the earth, other species, and one another, we have done with little recommend us but the play between our thumbs and fingers and our wondrous human brains.

And that brings us right back to the annoyance of the larger backdrop of The Urban Bestiary, since those wondrous human brains - at least the ones owned by Haupt's most likely customers - are solely responsible for the catastrophic warming of the planet's weather, for the global despoilation of every ecological niche in the world - including 60,000 square miles of rain forest razed every year - for the 100,000 elephants slaughtered every year for their tusks, for the total extinction of all the planet's wild rhinos and gorillas in the next ten years, for the 100 million sharks slaughtered every year for their fins, and for the worst mass-extinction window the planet has seen in hundreds of millions of years. The sub-title of Haupt's book, "Encountering the Everyday Wild," sets the suburban tone of the whole thing and never strays from a sunny impression of wonder slowly making its way back into our sterile cities and towns on furry feet or silken wing. But outside the gated boundaries of Westchester, humans with their wondrous brains are killing non-opportunistic animals in massive, unsustainable, planet-denuding numbers.Books like The Urban Bestiary are charming, no doubt - but their charms will take on a much more melancholy cast when the interstitial garbage-picking species re-invading human cities are the only wild species left on Earth.